"Rebuilding the Lives of the Wrongfully Convicted"

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NY TIMES: Herman Wallace, Held 41 Years in Solitary, Dies at 71

Published: October 4, 2013

Herman Wallace’s world for much of the last 41 years had been a solitary prison cell, 6 feet by 9 feet, when he left a Louisiana prison on Tuesday, freed by a federal judge who ruled that his original indictment in the killing of a prison guard had been unconstitutional. On Friday morning, Mr. Wallace died of cancer in New Orleans. He was 71.

He had been one of the “Angola 3,” convicts whose solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, an 18,000-acre prison farm on the site of a former plantation, became a rallying point for advocates fighting abusive prison conditions around the world.

Mr. Wallace was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery when the correctional officer, Brent Miller, was stabbed to death in a riot at Angola in April 1972. Mr. Wallace and two other men were indicted in the killing. Two of the three — Albert Woodfox and Mr. Wallace — were convicted in January 1974.

They were placed in solitary confinement, joining another prisoner there, Robert King, who had been convicted of a different crime, and for decades to follow they were locked up for as much as 23 hours a day. Amnesty International published a report on them in 2011, and they were the subject of a documentary film, “In the Land of the Free,” directed by Vadim Jean.

In the film, Teenie Verret, the widow of Brent Miller, said of the killing, “If they did not do this — and I believe that they didn’t — they have been living a nightmare.”

George Kendall, who was a lawyer for Mr. Wallace and who confirmed the death, said in an interview that his client’s original conviction was “a travesty” based on shoddy evidence, and that the men had been kept in solitary confinement because they had been members of the Black Panthers, the black nationalist group. Officials worried “that they would organize the prison,” he said.

Even from solitary, Mr. Wallace worked to improve prison conditions and to press his own appeals, Mr. Kendall said. He answered mail from people who had heard about his case.

“It was a determination he would not be broken by the loneliness of the cell,” Mr. Kendall said.

Mr. Wallace gained further attention for a project that he embarked on with Jackie Sumell, an artist who had struck up a correspondence with him and asked him to describe his “dream house.” She then rendered his imaginings into a scale model of the house, which became an art installation seen in galleries in a dozen countries.

The project, Mr. Wallace had said, “helps me to maintain what little sanity I have left, to maintain my humanity and dignity.” A documentary film about the project, “Herman’s House,” was shown on PBS in July.

Herman Wallace was born on Oct. 13, 1941, in New Orleans, the fourth of eight children. His mother, Edna Clark Williams, worked in the Orleans Parish Prison. She died in 1996. He is survived by his longtime partner, Maria Hinds, and five sisters: Victory Wallace, Lorraine Anderson, Barbara Marshall, Justina Williams and Darlene Williams.

Mr. King was released from prison in 2001; Mr. Woodfox is still in prison in Louisiana.

Mr. Wallace’s cancer was detected in June, his lawyers said. On Tuesday, Chief Judge Brian A. Jackson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ordered that Mr. Wallace be released from prison and said he could be retried.

The original indictment, he wrote, was fatally flawed because women had been excluded from the proceedings in which the grand jury was picked. Judge Jackson threatened to hold prison officials in contempt if they failed to release Mr. Wallace immediately.

“He has spent more than 40 years in prison under a conviction and sentence based on an unconstitutional indictment,” the judge wrote. “By any measure, the time remaining on Mr. Wallace’s life sentence is far less than he has already spent in prison.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Wallace was released from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, La. He was moved by ambulance to the home of a friend and supporter, Ashley Wennerstrom, a program director at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

Though Mr. Wallace was weak, drifting in and out of consciousness, Ms. Sumell said, “He was very well aware of the fact that he was in Ashley’s home, and he was a free man.”

On Thursday, Mr. Wallace was indicted again. Samuel C. D’Aquilla, the district attorney for East and West Feliciana Parish, said in an interview that he believed that the evidence originally used to convict Mr. Wallace remained sufficient to convict him again.

“We just felt that he was a murderer,” Mr. D’Aquilla said, adding, “I know he was old, I know he had medical problems, but when he committed a murder, he didn’t have medical problems.” Brent Miller, the murdered prison guard, he said, “didn’t get another chance.”

As Mr. Wallace lay dying, his friends at the Wennerstrom house did not speak of the indictment as they held a bedside vigil.

“One of the final things that Herman said to us,” his lawyers said in a statement, “was, ‘I am free. I am free.’ ”

Posted: Sunday, September 29, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 2:47 pm, Sun Sep 29, 2013.
BY FRANK GREEN
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Did the man who prosecuted Earl Washington Jr. for rape and murder lie to save a death sentence that was slipping away, as Washington’s lawyers allege?
Washington, exonerated in 2000, came within nine days of execution in 1985 and is the only person sentenced to death in Virginia who was later proved to be innocent.
A complaint to the Virginia State Bar charged that, as Washington’s guilt first came under doubt, John C. Bennett, a former Culpeper commonwealth’s attorney, lied to the Virginia Attorney General’s Office in an effort to preserve Washington’s death sentence.
According to an assistant attorney general who wrote a memo and a newspaper reporter, Bennett told them he had witnessed Washington’s disputed 1983 confession. Bennett wasn’t even in the same county when the confession happened.
The previously undisclosed bar complaint against Bennett — and the confidential 2009 bar ruling dismissing it — were made available last week to the Richmond Times-Dispatch by one of Washington’s lawyers.
The bar subcommittee report concluded, after a full investigation, that “the evidence available could not reasonably be expected to support any allegation of misconduct under a ‘clear and convincing’ evidentiary standard.”
Bennett, who was the Culpeper commonwealth’s attorney until 1991 and is now in private practice, did not return several calls for comment last week, nor did he respond to a letter from The Times-Dispatch requesting comment on the same matter in 2006.
Peter Neufeld, one of Washington’s lawyers and a co-founder of The Innocence Project, said, “What happened to the prosecutor in Earl’s case is one of the more disgusting inactions by a disciplinary committee that I have ever seen in the United States.”
Robert T. Hall, another lawyer for Washington, said Bennett claimed he “witnessed something that he hadn’t in an effort to get an innocent man executed, and the state bar’s decision that this was not supported by clear and convincing evidence was just unfathomable.”
“They bent over backwards to find excuses for his behavior,” Hall said of the bar subcommittee.
But after reviewing the complaint and the subcommittee’s ruling, Leslie A.T. Haley, a former senior assistant ethics counsel for the state bar now doing ethics consulting, said the results were not unusual.
“This comes down to what I see as a ‘he said, she said.’ The bar has to prove that a lawyer has violated one of the rules of professional conduct by a clear and convincing standard, which is a pretty high standard,” she said.
The “clear and convincing” standard is higher than the “preponderance of the evidence” standard required in a civil trial, though lower than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard in a criminal trial.
“This one, on these facts, I think is pretty hard to prove,” said Haley, adding that part of the problem is that there are only a limited number of people with firsthand knowledge of the situation.
In 1993, John H. McLees Jr. wrote a detailed memo for then-Virginia Attorney General Stephen D. Rosenthal about his telephone conversation with Bennett in which McLees reported that Bennett said he was certain of Washington’s guilt because he watched him confess.
On the one hand, she asked, “why would this assistant attorney general create this memo?”
“But still ... that’s pretty much all you’ve got,” said Haley. That it took two years to resolve the complaint “tells me they tried to really dig for some other stuff and couldn’t really find anything to hang their hat on ... as evidence.”
The controversy began in 1993 when then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder was considering sparing Washington, a mentally challenged farmhand, from death by the electric chair after DNA evidence raised the possibility — but did not conclusively prove — Washington was innocent of a 1982 rape and murder in Culpeper.
On Oct. 26, 1993, as Washington’s life hung in the balance, Bennett, who won Washington’s death sentence, called the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, apparently in response to its investigation of the clemency petition then pending before Wilder.
McLees took the call from Bennett, and two days later he wrote a memorandum about the call and sent it to Rosenthal and other superiors.
McLees wrote that after briefing Bennett on the DNA testing, “His most interesting comment was that there was no doubt whatsoever in his mind about Washington’s guilt, and he had never so much as turned over in his sleep during the entire 11 years concerning Washington’s sentence.”
“The reason for this is that, although he never told anyone for fear of becoming a witness in the case, he was present in the Fauquier Sheriff’s Department office on the Sunday morning when Washington confessed.”
“Bennett said it was as clear as could be from Washington’s demeanor, body language, tone of voice, etc., that he was getting an enormous load off his mind by confessing,” McLees wrote in the memo.
Also, a June 2000 article in the Culpeper News quoted Bennett as saying he was sure of Washington’s guilt “based on everything I’ve learned in this case, including watching Earl Washington confess.”
Wilder commuted Washington’s sentence to life in 1994. In 2000, after further DNA testing exonerated Washington, he was pardoned by then-Gov. Jim Gilmore. The testing implicated the real killer, who was convicted in 2007.
In 2006, Washington won a $2.25 million judgment in a federal civil rights suit alleging that investigators fed him details about the crime during his “confession” while he was being held in Fauquier County.
Testifying in the civil suit in April 2006, Bennett said that, while he remembered speaking with people at the attorney general’s office in 1993, he had no specific recollection of a conversation with McLees.
Neufeld read the McLees memo to Bennett, who denied saying he witnessed the confession. “He has got the details jumbled up,” Bennett said of McLees.
Bennett testified that any comments he made to the attorney general’s office about Washington’s demeanor concerned the observations of a jailor about Washington’s appearance before and after his confession in Fauquier County.
Bennett also testified that he told the attorney general’s office that, when police began questioning Washington in Culpeper, he left because he was prosecuting the case and did not want to be a witness.
McLees, said Bennett, “apparently … just got those facts sort of crisscrossed, and Fauquier confused with Culpeper and what happened there.”
Bennett also denied telling the newspaper reporter that he witnessed Washington’s confession.
Neufeld asked Bennett, “Would you have a sense that if an attorney lied to a deputy attorney general while a delicate decision is being made about whether someone should live or someone should be executed ... that it would be the kind of offense that the bar would suspend somebody for?”
Bennett said that he was not sure but added, “Let me just say emphatically that, personally, no, an attorney should not do anything like that.”
Testifying at the same 2006 trial, McLees said he had no independent recollection of the 1993 conversation with Bennett, aside from the memo he wrote for the attorney general two days afterward while it was still fresh in his mind.
Asked whether there was any doubt in his mind that Bennett unequivocally witnessed Washington’s confession, McLees testified: “I’m confident (Bennett) said exactly what was in this memorandum.”
Washington won the lawsuit.
Afterward, Washington’s lawyers filed a misconduct complaint with the Virginia State Bar against Bennett for his alleged assertions that he witnessed Washington’s confession.
The Dec. 20, 2006, complaint alleged Bennett lied about witnessing the confession to preserve the death sentence. It also alleged Bennett lied in court in 2006 when he denied making the remarks to McLees.
Washington’s lawyers initially would not confirm they filed a bar complaint against Bennett in 2006, and the state bar could not confirm one had been filed. But this month, Hall received an independent ethics opinion that he said freed him to disclose the complaint and the bar subcommittee’s report.
In the Jan. 14, 2009, report marked “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL,” a bar disciplinary subcommittee said it voted to dismiss the complaint after considering all the available evidence, including the McLees memo.
No mention was made in the report of the 2000 newspaper story. Haley said that may be because the committee felt anything in the newspaper story isn’t credible enough to be introduced as evidence.
“It’s just somebody has told a reporter information,” she said.
In tossing the complaint out, the three-member subcommittee, among other things, said that the evidence did not show McLees “contemporaneously drafted his memorandum” about the conversation, an apparent reference to it being written two days after the call.
The subcommittee report said there were “inaccuracies” in the McLees memorandum, but it only identified one — that Bennett was in Culpeper when Washington confessed, not in Fauquier. No one, however, alleged Bennett attended the confession, only that he lied about being there.
The chairwoman of the subcommittee said Friday that she could not comment.
The subcommittee ruled that the available evidence was not “clear and convincing” evidence of misconduct.
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THE WRONGFUL BLOG: Changes at Center on Wrongful Convictions Reveal the Power of a Few

29 September 2013

As reported in the Chicago Tribune today (here) and in a release from Northwestern University Law School, Rob Warden, co-founder and executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law will retire at the end of the academic year. He has served fifteen years leading the Center’s pioneering efforts. With the dedicated assistance of others, he and the Center on Wrongful Convictions have freed the innocent and have been influential in prompting a staggering list of policy reforms.
Warden co-founded the Center in 1998 with Lawrence Marshall, a former Northwestern law professor now at Stanford University. Warden will become the Center’s executive director emeritus.
A journalist, Warden worked for the Chicago Daily News and other papers before joining Northwestern. As is pointed out on the Center’s website (here) when the Center was founded, wrongful convictions were considered “anomalies—rare exceptions to an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine.”
The Center on Wrongful Convictions has expanded awareness of the reality that justice systems make mistakes, that countless innocent persons have been wrongfully convicted, that recurring common contributors prompt miscarriages, and that reforms can reduce wrongful convictions.
Working in the three areas of representation, research, and reform, the Center on Wrongful Convictions has had a profound impact on the lives of dozens of innocent men and women whose exonerations the Center has enabled or assisted. Center faculty, staff attorneys, and CWC law students have garnered the assistance of pro bono lawyers to assist in representing imprisoned clients with worthy claims of innocence. The Center initiated the first projects in the nation focusing on wrongfully convicted youth and wrongfully convicted women.
Under Warden’s leadership, the Center has been a leader in doing critical research on the causes of wrongful conviction and translating this research into reform recommendations. The Center has been at the forefront of reforms in Illinois that include then-Governor Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000; the passage of comprehensive criminal justice reform legislation in the state in 2003; expanded DNA testing in criminal cases; provision of adequate funding for indigent defendants; Governor Quinn’s abolition of the death penalty in 2011; compensation for the wrongfully convicted, and more.
Warden co-founded with Law Professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law, the National Registry of Exonerations, an online searchable database (here), which provides detailed information on all known exonerations since 1989. Today the Registry is reporting 1,210, a number that grows with each new or newly discovered exoneration.
With Warden’s retirement, the Center on Wrongful Convictions also announced other changes of individuals who have dedicated themselves to the Center’s work. Steven Drizin, a 1986 graduate of Northwestern Law, who has served as legal director for the past eight years, completed his work in this capacity on September 1, 2013, to assume the role of Assistant Dean at the Bluhm Legal Clinic, which houses more than 20 clinics within 14 centers including the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
Karen Daniel and Jane Raley, the two most senior staff attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, are the newly named co-legal directors of the Center. Both have been with the Center since 2000. Daniel is a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School, and Raley is a 1982 graduate of Indiana University School of Law.
Steven Drizin, calling Daniel and Raley “obvious choices” to take over as legal directors of the Center, said of the two: “They are two of the finest post-conviction and appellate attorneys in the country, often finding creative ways to win for their innocent clients where others before them have failed.”
The press release from Northwestern Law concluded, “Karen and Jane are also two of our most highly regarded teachers at the Clinic. They will inspire colleagues and students to provide the best possible service to our clients and to our system of justice. The CWC is one of the crown jewels of the Law School and has thrived under Steve and Rob’s leadership. We have every confidence that the CWC will rise to new and even more astounding heights with Karen and Jane at the helm.”
It is difficult to quantify the impact of these few who have done the hard work of seeking justice post conviction. Or to imagine where innocence efforts in the justice system would be without Rob Warden. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve Drizin, Karen Daniel, Jane Raley, and other staff and pro bono lawyers, Rob Warden provided leadership that enabled the Center on Wrongful Convictions to give hope to the wrongfully convicted, free the innocent, expand awareness of systemic issues in the criminal justice system, and advance long overdue policy reforms.
Thank you, Rob Warden. Thank you, Steven Drizin, Karen Daniel, and Jane Raley, and Godspeed to all of you in your next chapter

THE ADVOCATE: Louisiana paying wrongfully convicted, but is it enough?

29 September 2013

Critics say state doesn’t pay enough
By Jim Mustian and Ben Wallace
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Louisiana owes John Thompson 18 years of his life back — a debt it could not repay even in the best of financial times.
From the day he walked out of prison on May 9, 2003, exonerated of a 1985 murder, until the dawn of a new decade, Thompson didn’t receive a dime from the state that had come within weeks of executing him.
“It was like hell. It was worse than hell,” said Thompson, now 50, of the 14 years he spent on Death Row. “If that is not cruel and unusual punishment, not only to you but to your whole family, then I don’t know what is.”
For the wrongfully convicted, the road to compensation has been a long and frustrating journey, determined in many cases by geography and the arbitrary values assigned to the nightmare of serving undeserved prison time.
But Louisiana’s exonerees have notched incremental victories in Baton Rouge in recent years, securing payments that are often long overdue.
While nearly two dozen states don’t compensate exonerees at all, Louisiana has a statute that entitles people like Thompson to $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration — capped at $250,000 — plus up to $80,000 for “loss of life opportunities.”
At least two dozen of the state’s approximately 40 exonerees have been awarded some payment, while several others have cases pending, according to interviews and data provided by the state Treasury Department.
But several wrongfully convicted men said the compensation they receive can’t begin to atone for the miscarriage of justice that stripped them of the opportunity to pursue a career and raise a family.
Critics contend Louisiana’s law unfairly shortchanges people like Rickie Johnson, a man who spent more than two decades in prison for a rape he didn’t commit.
Under the statute, he is only entitled to be compensated for 10 of those years. Exonerees may also sue for damages, but such cases have proven difficult to win.
“I don’t think exonerees like myself that spent a quarter century in prison for a crime they didn’t commit should be scuffling as hard as we’re scuffling,” said Johnson, who learned leather work at Angola and opened a shop in Leesville after winning his freedom. “I’ve been out since 2008, and I still can’t afford to buy my home as every grown-up should have at my age.”
Advocates vow to further their efforts to increase compensation for the wrongfully convicted, the state’s perennial financial woes notwithstanding. Rep. Herbert B. Dixon, D-Alexandria, said he intends to re-introduce a bill next legislative session that would double the current compensation rate, bringing the state in line with neighboring Mississippi.
Other states — such as Texas, which pays $80,000 per year of wrongful incarceration with no cap — offer a far more generous penance.
Dixon said he’d like to see a court cost dedicated to fund Louisiana’s Innocence Compensation Fund, though he doesn’t expect much of an appetite among his colleagues.
“I think they ought to, at the very least, get a set amount of money for every year that they were incarcerated,” Dixon said. “That’s the least this state ought to be able to do, and it should be far more than $25,000 a year.”
Such proposals are likely to be a hard sell due to the state’s economic climate, said Michael Leo Owens, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written about the politics of compensating the wrongfully convicted.
“People are going to come forward and say, ‘Why do they need more?’ — especially in the context of economic insecurity among states,” Owens predicted.
Still, Owens said, Louisiana should applaud itself for at least having a compensation statute, noting there are 21 states — including Georgia and Arkansas — that do not. “In that way,” he added, “Louisiana is arguably one of the leaders in the U.S.”
Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, described the varying compensation statutes around the country as a patchwork that includes some bizarre limitation schemes.
“Quite a few states, including Louisiana, have increased the amount of money that can be paid to people who have been wrongly incarcerated,” Gross said. “But it’s far from what it should be.”
Louisiana passed its compensation statute in 2005 and awarded its first judgment the next year. The law requires exonerees to prove their “factual innocence” and receive a judgment from state district court in order to be paid.
The first $150,000 payment went to Gene C. Bibbins, a Baton Rouge man who logged 17 years in Angola for an aggravated rape he didn’t commit. Bibbins was awarded additional compensation after the cap increased. Since his exoneration, however, he has been convicted as an habitual offender and is serving state prison time again, with a projected release date in April.
An effort to raise the exoneree compensation cap to $500,000 failed in the legislature last year, but lawmakers did approve a measure that shifted the administration of the Innocence Compensation Fund to the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement.
The move was designed to streamline disbursements for exonerees, who for the first time did not have to have a personal bill passed this year appropriating their compensation checks, said Barbara G. Baier, a Treasury Department attorney.
The state had initially paid exonerees in lump sums but began paying yearly installments of $25,000 after increasing the maximum compensation from $150,000 to $250,000 in 2011.
“It’s always a toss-up whether any of this will be funded,” Baier said.
State figures show the number of wrongfully convicted receiving checks has increased in recent years. Nearly $3 million was awarded and about $1.5 million distributed in 2012 for wrongful convictions, according to a recent Louisiana Supreme Court report.
The awards marked an increase over the previous year, attributable in part to several compensated exonerees receiving supplemental funding after the cap was raised, said Kristin Wenstrom, an attorney with Innocence Project New Orleans.
Lawmakers appropriated $530,000 to the Innocent Compensation Fund this fiscal year, according to budget numbers, and an additional $250,000 for the wrongful conviction of Eddie Triplett in Orleans Parish.
Wenstrom said she was expecting compensation to be allocated for 22 exonerees this past session, but state officials said the official count was not available last week. At least five exonerees have cases pending in court, Wenstrom said.
Advocates have also faulted Louisiana’s statute for not including money for attorneys’ fees. Before Innocence Project New Orleans had the resources to take on these cases, some exonerees ended up with attorneys who took “20, 30 or 40 percent of their compensation” as a fee, Wenstrom said.
Other attorneys, however, including Philip G. Hunter of Alexandria, have handled the cases pro bono. “I felt terrible about these guys,” Hunter said. “What I have pledged is to try every time we can to get the amount (of compensation) increased.”
Thompson, the former Death Row inmate, said he dished out $50,000 — a third of his initial compensation — in attorney fees while fighting a three-year legal battle. It finally ended in 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision in a civil suit that would have awarded Thompson $14 million, or $1 million for every year he had spent on Death Row.
“I’m in so much medical debt it’s a crying shame,” Thompson said. “I’m without insurance. No life insurance, no health insurance.”
Also receiving compensation from the state is Earl Truvia, who spent more than 27 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit in New Orleans’ Calliope Projects. Before going to prison, he dreamed of becoming a fireman and perhaps going to college.
Instead, he’s living paycheck to paycheck with a financial future about as stable as a three-legged table.
“No money can replace the horror and tragedy I experienced while I was incarcerated,” Truvia said. “But they should be paying me retirement for the rest of my life. That’s something they took from me.”
Michael Anthony Williams, of Baton Rouge, experienced a similar loss. He said he’s had trouble covering his medical expenses even with compensation checks, a hardship faced by other exonerees as well.
Then there’s the indelible memory of his time in Angola, a place Williams remembers as “pure hell.”
“You can’t live like a human being in there,” said Williams, who was exonerated of rape in 2005. “You have to live basically like an animal because that’s all you’re surrounded by — a bunch of inmates that act like animals.”

AP: Emotional moment as brothers - wrongfully convicted of murder - are officially cleared after 25 YEARS in prison

25 September 2013

Two brothers who were imprisoned for 25 years for the murder of a Detroit marijuana dealer and released last year only to await a retrial and possible re-imprisonment have now had their names cleared for good.

The murder charges against Raymond, 47, and Thomas Highers, 48, will be dismissed thanks to a lack of evidence pinning them to the 1987 crime.

The case is expected to be officially dropped Thursday by Wayne County, Michigan Circuit Court Judge Lawrence Talon, the same judge who ordered the brothers be released after a quarter century in prison on August 13, 2012 after new evidence warranted a retrial.

Talon ordered a new trial for the brothers and let them out on bond after new witness testimony suggested they may have been misidentified in the 1987 slaying of 65-year-old Robert Karey in his east side Detroit home.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy appealed the ruling to the state Court of Appeals, which declined to reverse it. The case was scheduled for trial on Oct. 8.

‘Just as we did 26 years ago, we firmly believe in the evidence in this case,’ Worthy said Wednesday in a release. ‘We have worked diligently to bring this case to trial. With the passage of time it is an unfortunate reality that this case cannot be put back together and we must dismiss it.’

The brothers got the news that their 26-year-long saga was over from their attorney. Raymond was at work while Tommy was having lunch with his girlfriend.

Justice: 'Being able to correct an injustice, there¿s no greater feeling,' defense attorney Valerie Newman said.'They would have died in prison. It¿s a testament to the human character that they hold no bitterness.'

‘I’m just elated,’ Tommy told the Detroit Free Press. ‘It means a fresh start for me. It means freedom for me to do the things I want to do, to visit family in other states. I have no felony conviction on my record.’

His little brother, of course, agreed.

‘It means freedom and life. It’s been a long day coming,’ Raymond said. ‘Over 26 years, we’ve fought for this, and it’s finally here. It’s like being vindicated.’